First of all, for anyone who doesn’t follow NFL football, the Seattle Seahawks play the San Francisco 49’ers this weekend in the NFC Championship Game. The winner will be one of two teams that go to the Superbowl.

With that as background, for an upcoming piece on online coffee trends, we started crunching the numbers on Coffee Review traffic in 2013. Not surprisingly, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, the three most populous cities in the United States, were #1, #2, and #3, respectively, for the cities with the most Coffee Review readers.

However, to obtain a better picture of where people are passionate about coffee (at least as measured by Coffee Review readership), we normalized our traffic by factoring in a city’s population. We we did this, two cities popped to the top: Seattle and San Francisco. Using per capita visits (i.e. visits per million residents) as our measure, Seattle edged San Francisco by the slightest of margins, 13,605 to 13,424.

Hmm? Is this more than a coincidence? Maybe not. Maybe coffee is what gives these teams their edge?

Nonsense, you say? Well then, what about the teams in the AFC Championship Game? What about Denver and Boston (as a proxy for New England)? Denver is #10 with per capita visitation of 8,627. Boston is #13 with 7,681. As I said, hmm?

So, if coffee has anything to do with it, here are our picks for the weekend:

Seattle 24. San Francisco 23.

Denver 31. New England 24.

And, something you might actually care about… the top 10 cities based on per capita Coffee Review readership:

1. Seattle, WA

2. San Francisco, CA

3. Alexandria, VA

4. Cambridge, MA

5. Atlanta, GA

6. Madison, WI

7. Minneapolis, MN

8. Washington, DC

9. Hialeah, FL

10. Denver, CO

Next week, we’ll share further details of Coffee Review traffic trends by U.S. city, state, worldwide cities, and country.

Kenneth Davids is a coffee expert, author and co-founder of Coffee Review. He has been involved with coffee since the early 1970s and has published three books on coffee, including the influential Home Roasting: Romance and Revival, now in its second edition, and Coffee: A Guide to Buying, Brewing and Enjoying, which has sold nearly 250,000 copies over five editions. His workshops and seminars on coffee sourcing, evaluation and communication have been featured at professional coffee meetings on six continents.